NTSB Report On Uber Arizona Fatality

No Automatic Braking Deployed

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS Radio) -- The National Transportaion Safety Board released a preliminary report Thursday morning on the collision between a self-driving Uber vehicle and a woman walking a bicycle in Tempe, Arizona.

That crash March 18 crash left the woman dead and forced Uber to shut down its self-driving car program in Arizona.

The NTSB says the Volvo XC90 outfitted with Uber's autonomous-driving package was doing 43 miles an hour in a 45 mph zone when the incident occurred.

That Volvo is equipped with an anti-collision package known as City Safety, but the NTSB report says that function was disabled when the car was put into Uber's autonomous-driving mode.

The report says the car's radar and LIDAR systems spotted the pedestrian 6 seconds before impact, but it was only 1.3 seconds before impact that the system determined an emergency braking maneuver would be needed to avoid a collision.

The NTSB report says Uber's system requires the human operator to make such a braking maneuver. But in this case, the brakes weren't applied until after impact.

The report says the operator intervened less than a second before impact and didn't actually hit the brakes until after the car struck the woman.